The Africa Disaster Risk Financing Initiative supports agriculture insurance programs which unlock critical assess to credit for low-income farmers in Kenya, as well as in Uganda and Rwanda. Photo Credit: World Bank

Sub-Saharan Africa knows more than its fair share of disasters induced by natural hazards. The past few months alone have seen drought in the Horn of Africa, floods in Mali and Rwanda, and landslides in Ethiopia and Uganda. Between 2005 and 2015, the region experienced an average of 157 disasters per year, claiming the lives of roughly 10,000 people annually.

Reform leaders who are persuaded by the need to invest in human capital face the challenge of getting thousands of state personnel, who staff myriad government agencies, to deliver. The quintessential “delivery unit” in Africa, a region flagged by the Human Capital Index as having the greatest need for health and education investments, consists of local governments helmed by appointed bureaucrats and locally elected politicians. In new research in Uganda, we find that the quality of local politicians, elected at humble levels in a village or district, is a robust and substantial predictor of delivery of national health programs. These results suggest that for the Human Capital Project to have impact it may need to move beyond creating political space for national leaders to allocate more public resources to health and education and take-on the challenge of local politics as key to service delivery at the last mile.

An estimated one billion people around the world – half of which are in Africa – lack official identification to prove who they are. And many millions more have forms of identification that cannot be reliably verified or authenticated. More than 450 million of these are children who have not had their birth registered. Women and the poor in low-income countries are less likely to have official identification.

To stem violence, it is crucial that countries and program implementers are informed by evidence on what works best. There needs to be a stronger, broader knowledge base about prevention and response that can inform investments, policy and practice.

More than 150 people participated in the SotM Africa conference in 2017. (Courtesy of SotM Africa)

There is a unique space where you can encounter everyone from developers of self-driving cars in Silicon Valley to city planners in Niamey to humanitarian workers in Kathmandu Valley: the global OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. It comprises a geographically and experientially diverse network of people who contribute to OSM, a free and editable map of the world that is often called the “Wikipedia of maps.”
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What is perhaps most special about this community is its level playing field. Anyone passionate about collaborative mapping can have a voice from anywhere in the world. In the past few years, there has been a meteoric rise of locally organized mapping communities in developing countries working to improve the map in service of sustainable development activities.

The next opportunity to see the OSM community in action will be the November 14th mapathon hosted by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR)’s Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI). Mapathons bring together volunteers to improve the maps of some of the world’s most vulnerable areas, not only easing the way for emergency responders when disaster strikes, but also helping cities and communities plan and build more resiliently for the future.

Evelyn Namara, CEO of Vouch Digital, shares her entrepreneurship story during the World Bank Uganda Innovation Day Out, an event held to commemorate End Poverty Day. Vouch Digital provides digital vouchers for aid agencies. Photo: World Bank/Edgar Batte

Around the time Marvel’s Black Panther film was breaking box office records across the globe, I met with a high-ranking Ugandan official in Washington, D.C. In the middle of conversation, I asked what I needed to know as the new country manager for Uganda. He leaned over and said, “Uganda is Wakanda!”

My interest in public health began in childhood and was marked by my experiences growing up in a low-income country with limited public health infrastructure. I felt firsthand the impact of an inadequate public health system when a beloved cousin succumbed to AIDS. My mother suffered a prolonged, resistant infection with complications after invasive surgery, and my family constantly battled malaria due to drug resistance or counterfeit drugs.

I visited Jordan in 2014 and 2016 and was struck by the generosity and hospitality of this small, middle-income country, which accepted the influx of more than 740,000 refugees of the Syrian war and other conflicts (and that only counts the number officially registered by the UN Refugee Agency!) In 2017, Jordan had 89 refugees per 1,000 people –the second-highest concentration in the world. Its services and economy were under tremendous strain. The refugees themselves were frustrated by lack of opportunity to support themselves.

Blattman, Fiala, and Martinez (2018), which examines the nine-year effects of a group-based cash grant program for unemployed youth to start individual enterprises in skilled trades in Northern Uganda, was released today. Those of you well versed in the topic will remember Blattman et al. (2014), which summarized the impacts from the four-year follow-up. That paper found large earnings gains and capital stock increases among those young, unemployed individuals, who formed groups, proposed to form enterprises in skilled trades, and were selected to receive the approximately $400/per person lump-sum grants (in 2008 USD using market exchange rates) on offer from the Northern Uganda Social Action Funds (NUSAF). I figured that a summary of the paper that goes into some minutiae might be helpful for those of you who will not read it carefully – despite your best intentions. I had an early look at the paper because the authors kindly sent it to me for comments.